I thought life was too short to live without bacon and booze – then I hit 50

As editor of lads’ mag Loaded, heavy drinking was part of the day job for Martin Deeson – until he realised something needed to give

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Sometime in my early 20s I heard the expression, “you should live every day as if it’s your last”, and took it to heart. My interpretation was that you should live every day without a care for the future: fried breakfast, pub lunch, bit of work, party, four hours of sleep and off again.
Hangovers lasted three hours, and lunches lasted longer. Life was too short to be healthy, and anyway at that age you’re bouncy. It wasn’t until I hit 50 that the pain started to outweigh the fun, and with a shock you realise that you’re not immortal – today is quite unlikely to be your last, and all those health warnings might actually apply to, gulp, me?
My regular routine between the ages of 20 and 50 involved a “good breakfast” (typically of something fried and unhealthy between two slices of bread), followed by lunch, either another enormous sandwich slathered in mayo or, on a better day, an enormous bowl of pasta washed down with copious amounts of wine. Dinner, if it happened at all, might involve a takeaway (and there were no healthy takeaways back in the day), or more likely just more booze, pints on a quiet night, champagne on a busy one, some canapés if you were lucky.
My philosophy was that life was just too much fun to waste time down the gym or in the vegan juice bar – and there was a lot of fun to be had. As the editor-at-large for Loaded magazine – which launched 30 years ago and is celebrated this week in a BBC Arena special Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem – and then as the senior editor at GQ, I was paid to party.
My desk was covered in invites (more canapés, more champagne), my diary was full of foreign trips and there were deadlines to meet – there wasn’t time to be hungover and I thought there’s only one way to prevent a hangover, and that’s to never stop drinking. That was the logic of the early 2000s and it was a way of life I cheerfully followed with little thought of the future.
But now, as I approach 60 I rarely drink. I have a gym membership and a trainer, I go hiking and I’ve just had a bank of blood tests that came back a lot better than the MOT on my nine-year-old Audi (which is, like me, soon to be accorded Classic status). My diet now is more likely to focus on protein than carbs and nothing is deep fried. I also steer clear of processed foods – I’m convinced that the obesity epidemic which happened in my lifetime is caused by ready meals, biscuits, breakfast cereal, fast food, sugary drinks and supermarket bread. It’s hard to avoid them completely but I’d say I’ve cut those things down by 90 per cent.
So what changed? Well, a couple of things. First, after 50, the fun started to go out of it. The hangovers started being three days instead of three hours. The parties started to look a bit familiar. And then my wife announced that she wanted to try IVF as we had never conceived in our decade of marriage and part of me thought, “Sure, why not?” and another part realised that this might be the encouragement I needed to get sober… for someone else.
So I made a plan.
First, I thought, I need to give up smoking because that’s the one that is almost guaranteed to kill you. About two-thirds of all long-term smokers will die from it, losing on average about 10 years of life, the doctors tell us. Next, I thought, I need to give up drinking, because that is the one that seems to be gradually more painful every year – and even as I partied less, the wine o’clock habit, I could tell, was just as harmful as standing at the bar in fashion week quaffing champagne. And third, I need to lose weight and get fit.
And so, like a man with a plan, I tackled them in that order.
The first change was the hardest but by far the most rewarding. I had tried to give up smoking so many times over the years, I thought I was doomed to fail – and every time a little bit of self-confidence went with it. I had tried – hypnotism, patches, vaping, cutting down, snuff (yes, really) and willpower – but every time the withdrawal had been so horrendous that I had cracked. I had read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking before, but I read it again and this time it stuck.
The lessons I took away were this:
In that first month I walked out of a party one night because I knew that if I stayed I would smoke. After a month it was over. And now, almost a decade later, it feels like one of my biggest achievements – and the benefits? Within weeks your skin starts to glow, your brain starts to un-fog and after three months every part of your system sings from the increase in oxygen. Plus, it gives you the willpower to tackle what needs to come next.
My tip: Set aside a quiet week and just stop. White-knuckle it and don’t ever doubt your decision. Never smoke again no matter how bad you feel, and you will win through in a month.
When we’re in our 20s the thought of doing anything for a year other than having fun seems like an impossibly long commitment. However by the time I hit my early 50s I knew I was drinking too much (and what had once been the lubricant for fun had now become the answer to stress, the answer to writer’s block, the answer to social anxiety and, worst of all, the answer to a hangover).
And so I tried Dry January and to be honest I didn’t feel that much better. And then, oh glorious day, my wife succeeded in becoming pregnant and so of course she gave up all drinking. Now it was easy, so I stopped drinking for three months and that was when I really started to feel some benefit. In fact I started to feel amazing, to sleep like a baby, to realise that you can have fun and bad days without a drink at your elbow and then I slipped back off the wagon.
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So a wise friend said to me, why not give up for a year? That way you will be giving up properly, not just giving up until… you have a bad day or until there’s a good party or any other excuse. And it was so good at the end of the year I decided to do another year. And then another: in the end I gave up drinking entirely for four years and completely re-set the clock.
In the last nine months I’ve started drinking the occasional glass of wine – once or maybe twice a week, no more than a couple of glasses at a time and only in social situations, and you know what? – drinking is really pleasant, a social lubricant. But I did it once recently three evenings in a row and I remembered why I gave up in the first place: it’s also a poison and one of the first things it poisons is the ability to remember how good you feel without it. Many people I know only feel at their best after a glass or three of wine – and that is tragic.
My tip: The herbal supplement L-theanine, great for calming you down when life gets you jittery. Also books: Alcohol Explained by William Porter (tells you why alcohol makes you anxious for days after you drink it, and once you understand that, you know that wine is not the answer to stress).
What worked for me was going keto (high fat, medium protein, low carb). It’s not for everyone and the evidence on its long-term effects is somewhat mixed but it’s an effective solution for weight loss.
In addition, it has been found to be very beneficial by some who suffer from poor mental health, be it anxiety or depression or both – which is something that I’ve struggled with all my life. If I eat carbs, I get hungry, and if I don’t, I don’t get hungry for a lot longer.
My tip: If it’s not in the fridge you can’t eat it. Shop thin and delete Deliveroo.
For those of us with little willpower and a tendency to seek out comfort and happiness there is only one solution to this that I know: hire yourself a personal trainer who charges you the full cost if you cancel on the day. For the first year or two of my new regime I walked and walked and walked, about an hour a day, and that was great and I lost a lot of weight and it kept me sane.
But at the end of the day if there’s a guy turning up at your door with a grin on his face and a box of weights, you ain’t got nowhere to hide. Building muscle in midlife has been a game changer for me: that’s when the weight started to fall off. It also protects the ageing joints and lifting weights makes you feel great.
My tip: Walk everywhere and get a trainer. Whatever it costs, it’s cheaper than wine.
Within a few months of giving up drinking I started to sleep like a baby with a clean conscience. Giving up smoking also made a huge difference, as did stopping stuffing my face late at night in the light of the fridge door as I coped with yet another hangover.
The irony of having a baby at 53 is that you’d think my hours of sleep would be disrupted but in fact it’s quite the opposite – even now she’s six years old, by the time she goes to bed at 8.30, that’s it, I’m ready to clock off. All the research says that a regular bedtime and getting up early are all good for your health – well try living with a six-year-old: I’m in bed by nine, asleep by 10 and up at six. I’ve never slept better.
My tip: Get out in the sunlight early in the day. It will reset your body clock, improve your energy and sleep quality.
This is the big one for me. I used to party to distract myself from the fact that I’m anxious, and I used to drink to make myself happy in social situations, and I used to smoke because it was my little warm friend in my hand – but for some reason I have always resisted going to the doctor for antidepressants. I’ve recently had a month off training as a result of a nasty bout of Covid and once again I’m struggling with my mood so I am reminded that the fitter I am physically, the better my mental health.
People will say that life is short but I think the opposite. As I approach 60 I feel that life has been long and I don’t worry too much about getting old because I think the alternative is much worse. “Don’t let the old man in”, as Clint Eastwood says. I would add to that “don’t encourage the feeling of being old by being hungover and tired and unfit. Make pleasure a treat, not a daily quest, and you’ll do alright.”
My tip: Any kind of exercise reduces your risk of depression: doing it in nature is guaranteed to bust a low mood.
Loaded: Lags, Mags and Mayhem is available on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer from November 22
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